Sammy Sosa's Hop Of Joy

The Hop-trot: Step By Step

On a perfect, warm, summer Sunday afternoon at Wrigley Field, Sammy Sosa was standing in the batter's box, which meant there was only one place to look. The Cubs were trailing the Mets by a run in the bottom of the sixth inning. The crowd of more 40,000 turned toward home plate, and watched Sosa work. The longer Sosa extended his time at the plate, the greater the chance that Rick Reed, the Mets' pitcher, would make a mistake.

Finally, Sosa swung with so much torque that his weight was transferred from his right leg forward to his left and then back to his right. Then came the telltale hop. Sosa planted his right foot, pushed hard, and propelled himself to his right and into the air. The fans behind him were rising from their seats. Sosa hung there, his feet apart, then closer together, then apart before they landed in the dirt. He was headed in the direction of the corner of Sheffield and Addison, on his way to first base. Mets fans in the park could only think, "Oh, no."

There was no need to look toward the center-fielder, or the fans in the bleachers, in search of the inevitable result. The roar was peaking, the Mets' lead was gone. For the hop rarely lies.

In a baseball season that grows more surreal each week, it is difficult to decide which is more delicious; that Sosa could soon reach 60 home runs and beyond, or that his signature response to nearly every one is such a natural and joyful expression in an age of endless self-promotional hype.

The slo-mo minutia of the video age has eroded too many sporting achievements to the point that they serve only to set up the reaction shot. You can see the highlights every night, from passe football spikes to contrived dance steps (Remember the Ickey Shuffle?) to a defiant fling of the bat that says "take that."

In one breathless moment in Boston's Fenway Park during the climax of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between Boston and Cincinnati, NBC director Harry Coyle spotted an image that forever altered televised sports. A camera placed within the left-field scoreboard followed Carlton Fisk of the Red Sox, jumping again and again as he waved and wished his fair-or-foul fly ball into a series-tying home run. By the time Fisk's feet hit the ground for good, the professional athlete had entered a brave new world. Future displays would not require the same genuine emotion. If you hit a ball hard, you would get to say "Look at me."

But Sammy Sosa's home run hop doesn't make that demand. Sosa seems to be asking, "Am I really doing this?"

"It's happiness," said Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub, who sees a piece of himself as he watches Sosa's hop. "It's exciting. It's unique. It expresses his character. It's tremendous joy."

The hop is practical. It redirects the force of his follow-through to a path toward first base. "He swings so hard that his weight is going that way when he finishes," said Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood, whose game-winning home run last Monday held no hop. "So I think he's just catching up with his body before he falls down."

The hop is artistic. Followers of ballet have spotted traces of everything from a grande jete to a temps de fleche. The hop gives a memorable time at bat its very own denouement. It punctuates. It resonates.

"Some of the balls he hits, you just want to watch the ball all the way," said Ed Lynch, the general manager of the Cubs. "But if I don't hear that home run sound, I look to Sammy. And if he hops, to me, he hit it pretty good. I look to him when the balls are not crushed. When he hops, you know the ball is gone."

Now that the home run race of 1998 has become a national phenomenon, now that we are in a massive search for all things Sammy, he has grown sensitive to the idea that the hop is a dance step, possibly even a disrespectful one.

"I've been doing that for a long time," Sosa said. "I haven't been doing that because I'm having the year that I'm having. I've been doing it seven or eight years. I have a lot of respect for the other team. When I connect I jump, but I run the bases hard. I'm not the type of player that tries to show them up and be the Man. This is not me. I never will show up anybody."

Maybe we just weren't paying close enough attention. Surely we didn't have as many opportunities to see it as his game began to develop, first on the South Side and then at his current business address. Rudy Jaramillo, a coach for the Texas Rangers, first worked with Sosa 12 years ago. Sosa was 17, fresh from the poor town of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. His English was painfully limited, but he had a gift for expressing himself.

"Sammy has always been the same," Jaramillo said Wednesday afternoon. He was standing in the visitors' clubhouse at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, looking at a television screen as he spoke on the telephone about his old pupil. "When he hit a home run, he kind of did the same little thing, just like he did right now."